This AP story and tweet is carefully worded to imply that a causal connection between Floyd’s death and the officer crushing Floyd’s neck with his knee is still substantially in doubt. It omits salient facts and blurs the known timeline of Floyd’s last moments to that end. https://twitter.com/ap/status/1266420193795997697

However, the AP writers do no such favors for the protestors who object to the murder of George Floyd. The AP lede states matter-of-factly that their protests “resulted in fires and looting,” as though the causal connection there was fully established.

AP is not alone in framing its stories this way, which is why I keep coming back to the video of the unidentified white man wearing a gas mask and holding an umbrella calmly smashing the windows of an Autozone while black protestors try to stop him and chase him away.

News organizations have been treating the reporting of that incident as a tertiary matter, as best I can tell. But you can’t with any honesty write ledes blaming the protestors for the violence and property crimes without getting to the bottom of what’s going on in that video.

Here’s the LAT with a better factual description but fundamentally the same approach. The police are carefully excluded from the man’s death, despite the video, but the looting and fires are all “included” in the protests with a certainty that overwhelms any question of evidence. https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1266421530076090368

Here’s a different way one might write the AP lede.